Infectious Disease Modeling in the Era of Complex Data

Dear Colleagues,

With the recent explosion of open data sources, novel analytical tools, increased computation and visualization capacities, and public interest in data-related topics, new opportunities have emerged to better understand the nature, drivers, and implications of emerging and re-emerging infections, especially infections notorious for their strong seasonal patterns, sensitivity to climate and weather fluctuations, and links to environmental drivers. Seasonal patterns in infectious diseases have been long recognized by physicians, epidemiologists, environmental scientists, and public health professionals. This phenomenon has been observed in many environmental, biological and social processes. Yet pressing questions still remain, such as: What is needed to detect flu peaks before the season starts? What can be learned from developing local and global calendars of infection? What can be done to break the transmission of hospital-acquired infections? What are the likely routes of foodborne outbreaks in a given season? How we can build a comprehensive understanding of new type of algorithmic biases that emerge as we compile, fuse, and assemble time-referenced data from many sources?  We hope to stir the discussion on how data scientists, modelers, statisticians and forecasters working together with domain experts have to rethink and reframe the state-of-the-art methodology to enable the discovery of emerging trends in infectious diseases.

This Special Issue highlights the advancements and challenges of quantifying important features in disease dynamics. We aim to provide a broad range of examples where the knowledge of temporal dynamics, environmental factors, and seasonal characteristics, such as peak timing, seasonal amplitudes, duration and onset, are crucial for the journal’s broad readership. We especially encourage the submission of interdisciplinary work and multi-country collaborative research. We also encourage the submission of health policy-related manuscripts that focus on issues related to infectious disease dynamics and their relationship to the environment, and recommendations for improving local and global surveillance systems. We welcome original research papers using different study designs as well as systematic reviews and meta-analysis.

Prof. Dr. Elena N. Naumova
Dr. Tania M. Alarcon Falconi
Guest Editors

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